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Saturday, 1 March 2014

Recipes - Tomato Sauce

My grand aunt, Catherine Victoria Edmonstone, first jotted out her
recipe for tomato sauce with blue ink in an un-ruled notebook ninety years ago
- back in 1924. She wrote it out again in 1967 - but the ingredients and her method remained exactly the same.

She grew her tomatoes
and supplied her relatives for the next four decades – but kept the recipe
to herself.

Since the notebook fell into my hands, I have followed her recipe carefully. It makes awesome sauce with shop bought ingredients - but, it has never been quite the same sauce as Catherine Victoria Edmonstone produced.

This year I decided to try something a little
different - choosing my ingredients more carefully. Because today is the first day of
autumn and the tomato vines are full of ripe fruit, it is time for make sauce.

Mix:

12 lb – 6kg ripe
tomato

1lb – 500g sliced
onion

2oz – 60g garlic
sliced (note that she used garlic brought
back from the Palestine – small and bitter than available today)

It takes about a week's storage for a sauce's taste to mature. However, a taste before bottling brought back all the old memories flooding back in.

So what did I do differently?

Tomatoes have changed. Since the 1940s, commercially grown tomatoes have been grown for color rather than taste. Supermarket tomatoes can have little taste and some of the homegrown commercial varieties are pretty bland.

So this year, like my grand aunt had done over so many years, I grew a range of old heirloom varieties of tomato from seed. These tomatoes are sweet and full of flavor. And, now, so is the sauce.